The Team That Invented Football

Just two decades after Wounded Knee, the Carlisle Indian
School transformed a plodding, brutal college sport into the
fast, intricate game we know todayBy Sally Jenkins, Sports
Illustrated
Find this article at:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/more/04/19/carlisle0423/index.html

Thorpe (top right) and the 1912 Indians were
the highest-scoring team in the nation.

Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical
Soc.

The game, like the country in which it was created, was a
rough, bastardized thing that jumped up out of the mud. What was
football but barely legalized fighting? On the raw afternoon of
Nov. 9, 1912, it was no small reflection of the American
character.

The coach of the Carlisle Indian School, Glenn Scobey (Pop)
Warner, strode up and down the visitors' locker room, a Turkish
Trophy cigarette forked between his fingers. Warner, slab-faced
and profane, wasn't one for speeches, unless cussing counted.
But he was about to make an exception.

The 22 members of the Carlisle team sat, tensing, on rows of
wooden benches. Some of them laced up ankle-high leather cleats,
as thick-soled as jackboots. Others pulled up heavy football
pants, which bagged around their thighs like quilts. They
shrugged into bulky scarlet sweaters with flannel stuffed in the
shoulders for padding. Flap-eared leather helmets sat on the
benches next to them, as stiff as picnic baskets.

Often Warner was at a loss to inspire the Indians. He didn't
always understand their motives, and he had put his boot in
their backsides on more than one occasion. Jim Thorpe could be
especially galling. The 25-year-old Oklahoman from the Sauk and
Fox tribe had an introverted disposition and a carelessness that
baffled Warner. But on this Saturday afternoon Warner knew just
how to reach Thorpe -- and his teammates. Carlisle, the nation's
flagship institution for Native Americans, was to meet the U.S.
Military Academy in a showdown between two of the top football
teams in the country.

It was an exquisitely apt piece of national theater: a
contest between Indians and soldiers. The officers-in-training
in the home locker room represented a military legacy that
taunted the Indians. The frontier battles between Native
Americans and the saber-waving U.S. Army "long knives" were
fresh in the players' minds -- Warner had been reminding them of
the subject all week. "I shouldn't have to prepare you for this
game," the coach had told them. "Just go to your rooms and read
your history books."

Only 22 years earlier, on Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army had
massacred Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee in the last major
confrontation between the military and American Indians.
Feelings between the Army and tribesmen still ran so high that
this was just the second time they had been allowed to meet on a
sports field. "When Indian outbreaks in the West were frequent
the Government officials thought it unwise to have the
aborigines and future officers combat in athletics," The New
York Times reported.

Jim Thorpe

Under a slate-colored sky, 5,000 people filled the
grandstands that ringed Army Field in West Point, N.Y. Among
them was silver-mustached Walter Camp, the sport's eminence and
the arbiter of All-Americas. Correspondents from the Times,
the New York Tribune and the New York Herald
scribbled bad Indian metaphors in their notebooks. Cadets in
high-necked tunics stood erect in the bleachers, eager to see
Army defend its honor. Sporty young men in three-button sack
suits with fashionably cuffed pants had come from Manhattan to
see the results of their wagers. Ladies in organdy moved through
the crowd, their enormous-brimmed hats floating in the air like
boats.

It was an audience steeped in frontier lore, raised on
blood-curdling newspaper accounts of "hostiles," Western dime
novels like Mustang Merle, The Boy Rancher and, of
course, on Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The rising popularity
of football had closely followed the ebbing of the frontier
wars. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia had formed the
Intercollegiate Football Association on Nov. 23, 1876 -- just
four months after the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong
Custer's troops at Little Big Horn. By the 1890s Victorian
America was intensely preoccupied with the sport as a new male
proving ground and a remedy for the neurasthenia of the age. On
quadrangles across the country, collegians slammed into one
another until the blood and spittle flew, and leviathan stadiums
were built to accommodate the growing pastime.

One of the campuses most obsessed with football was West
Point. Participation in the game was almost a requirement for
the truly ambitious Cadet; the Army locker room on the day of
the Carlisle game contained no fewer than nine future
generals. And the Cadets loved the most bullying form of
football. They were a squad of imposing brawn: Army's captain,
Leland Devore, stood 6'6" and weighed 240 pounds. In the
backfield was an iron-legged halfback named Dwight David
Eisenhower, who was known for punishing opponents. The coach of
the 1912 team, a martinet named Ernest (Pot) Graves, had looked
at a steamroller parked outside the West Point officers' club
and said, "There is my idea of football."

In Carlisle the Cadets met their philosophic and stylistic
opposite. The Indians were significantly smaller than Army, but
they were renowned for their dazzling sleight of hand and for
the breathtaking speed of their star runner, the Olympian
Thorpe. Under Warner's creative tutelage they had mastered an
astounding array of trick plays -- reverses, end-arounds,
flea-flickers -- and forward passes. Their talent for deception
was born partly of necessity: With a student body of just 1,000,
ranging in age from 12 to 25, Carlisle was perpetually
undermanned. But deception also suited the Indians' keen sense
of injustice at the hands of whites. "Nothing delighted them
more than to outsmart the pale faces," Warner observed. "There
was never a time when they wouldn't rather have won by an
eyelash with some wily stratagem than by a large score with
straight football."

Ironically, it was a soldier who had founded Carlisle.
Richard Henry Pratt, a cavalry officer who had commanded the
all-black Buffalo Soldiers in the frontier wars, established the
school in an old Army barracks in Pennsylvania in 1879 for the
purpose of "civilizing" Indian children. It was a harsh social
experiment. As Pratt liked to declaim, Kill the Indian, save
the man. Carlisle students were forbidden to speak their
tribal languages, paint their skin or wear braids or blankets.
The school clothed them in surplus military uniforms and taught
them to march like soldiers.

On Carlisle's athletic green, however, an altogether
different experiment took place, this one conducted by the
pupils. The record books couldn't convey just how innovative and
influential the Carlisle football teams were. Every time a
quarterback today feigns a handoff or rears back to throw, he
owes a debt to the Indians. Before Carlisle, football was a dull
and brutal game, wedges of men pushing one another around in the
dirt. The Indians found new ways to win, and they transformed
the game into the thrilling high-speed chase it is now.

They didn't change just football. They changed prevailing
ideas about Native Americans. To well-meaning missionaries,
land-grabbing politicians and Wild West Show audiences, Indians
were heathen, degraded, mentally inferior or simply assigned by
God to be victims. The Carlisle players were different: They
were winners.

But against Army, simply winning wasn't good enough. The
Indians intended to win in a certain way. Warner had
developed an extraordinary new offense: an exercise in exact
timing, artfully disguised ball handling and, above all, speed.
The Indians had held it under wraps game after game. When Warner
asked them against which opponent they wanted to debut the
scheme, they had been unanimous: "The soldiers."

As the Indians finished dressing, Warner surveyed the locker
room. There was quarterback Gus Welch, the orphaned Chippewa
from Wisconsin, slightly built but with a conjurer's quickness
of foot and hand. There was tackle Pete Calac, a Mission Indian
from Fall Brook, Calif., who lost two siblings to typhoid and
came to Carlisle on the Union Pacific with only a third-grade
education. Then there was Thorpe, sleepy-eyed yet with a buried
intensity. Warner took a few minutes to review the new game
plan. Then, when he was sure each player understood his
assignment, he addressed them all. "Your fathers and your
grandfathers," Warner began, "fought their fathers. These men
playing against you today are soldiers. They are the Long
Knives. You are Indians. Tonight, we will know if you are
warriors."

The Carlisle practice field was a piece of hardpan that could
chip the blade off a shovel. It was an uneven, rock-strewn acre
irrigated with the Indians' sweat. The players themselves had
dug the field, measured it, graded it and sodded it.

On a September day in 1899, Warner stood on the field and
scrutinized his new football team. His heart dropped to his
shoes. The players were "listless and scrawny, many looking as
if they had been drawn through a knothole," he would recall
later. Over the next 13 years, the coach would have just one
Carlisle team whose players averaged more than 170 pounds.

Warner was 28 when he was hired by Carlisle on the
recommendation of Camp, for whom he had played at Cornell before
going on to coach football at Georgia, Iowa State and his alma
mater. Warner had a reputation for creativity. At Georgia he had
experimented with the screen pass and the tackling dummy. He
also developed theories of fitness, diet, training and
motivation. He rousted the Bulldogs at 6 a.m. for five-mile runs
and locked them in their dorm at night. He was an authoritarian
who backed up his words with physical force; he gave up
scrimmaging with the Bulldogs only when he broke the collarbone
of one of his players. Then in two seasons as Cornell's head
coach he went 15-5-1.

When Pratt approached him to become Carlisle's athletic
director, Warner was intrigued. The Indians had begun playing
intercollegiate football four years earlier. Cornell had beaten
them 23-6 during the '98 season, but, Warner would recall, "the
Indian boys appealed to my football imagination." Also, Pratt
offered him $1,200, a salary almost unheard of for a coach.

The first practices went slowly. A number of the players
didn't speak English, and when Warner wanted them to do
something he had to gesture with his cigarette. In addition,
Warner admitted later, "I had all the prejudices of the average
white." Among them was the idea that Indians were lazy. "Back in
the days when Daniel Boone was my hero," Warner said, "I used to
read that Indians always quit if they didn't win a fight at the
very outset."

Gradually, coach and players got better acquainted. The
Indians had a mordant wit that Warner began to enjoy. They gave
each other acerbic nicknames. One boy, who had a habit of eating
pie with his knife, was known as Sword Swallower. Warner also
found he and his players had something more important in common:
audacity. The coach was brimming with fresh theories, and the
Indians were open to all of them. Best of all, they were fast
learners. "After a week or so of keen-eyed watching," Warner
remarked, "these beginners would turn and do the thing as though
they had been trained to do it their whole lives."

Since the Indians lacked size, Warner developed new
techniques to exploit their speed and agility. He invented the
body block. The standard method of blocking was with the
shoulder, but Warner taught the flyweight Indians to roll and
use the length of their bodies to cut their opponents down at
the knees. Quick, low line charges became their hallmark, a
style so distinctive that opponents termed it "Indianizing."

Next Warner came up with the crouching start. The normal
position for a running back was upright, with his feet apart,
hands on knees. But it occurred to Warner that a runner could
fire more quickly from a coiled position. He had the Carlisle
backs crouch and push off with one or both hands.

The Indians opened the 1899 season with four straight
victories. Then, on Oct. 14, they met Pennsylvania, a team that
featured three All-Americas. The Quakers had beaten Carlisle by
an average of 24 points in their four previous meetings, but
they weren't prepared for the speed with which these
Warner-coached players jumped off the lines. Carlisle never
trailed on its way to a 16-5 victory.

The Indians went on to an 8-2 season, their only losses
coming to the Nos. 1 and 2 teams in the country, Princeton and
Harvard, respectively. On Thanksgiving Day, Carlisle met
Columbia at New York City's Polo Grounds. The Indians put on a
virtuoso exhibition of their new techniques and formations,
including a baffling line shift they employed for the first
time: The entire team moved to one side of the center, and on a
signal the unbalanced line surged forward, followed by a
ballcarrier.

Carlisle's Isaac Seneca vaulted out of his three-point stance
to rip off gains of 25 and 30 yards. He scored twice, while
Frank Hudson drop-kicked four field goals. The final score was
42-0, and Columbia's players retreated to their dressing room in
shame. The Indians were rewarded with a No. 4 national ranking
by Camp, who named Seneca a first-team All-America at running
back -- the only honoree who didn't attend an Ivy League school.
Carlisle's Martin Wheelock was a second-teamer at tackle and
Hudson a third-teamer at quarterback.

But the Indians weren't finished playing yet. They were
invited to take on the best team in the West, Cal, which was
7-0-1. On Christmas Day, 15,000 fans went to San Francisco's
16th and Folsom streets field to watch a game billed as the
"East-West championship." Unfortunately the Westerners had gone
to extreme lengths to enhance their home field advantage. They
had covered the pitch with sand. Next, Cal presented the game
ball: a weighty thing that looked like a large squash. With the
sand and the heavy ball Cal meant to negate the Indians' speed
and Hudson's dropkicks. Warner and his players protested, to no
avail.

All afternoon the two teams crawled through the sand. Hudson
missed every kick he tried. Carlisle scored just once -- on a
safety. But that was enough: The Indians won 2-0.

As the players made their way home by rail, they stopped to
visit other Indian academies. One of these was the Haskell
Institute, in Lawrence, Kans. On Jan. 12, 1900, the Haskell
student body turned out for a dress parade and a breakfast in
the Carlisle players' honor. One boy gazed with particular awe
at the famous All-Americas, Seneca, Wheelock and Hudson.

He was a woebegone child who was infected with the football
craze that had swept the Haskell campus. Like his schoolmates he
played in his work jeans and boots, chasing a homemade ball -- a
stocking stuffed with grass and tied at both ends. This was the
12-year-old Jim Thorpe.

Football and Carlisle had become indivisible. Warner created
an ambitious junior varsity nicknamed the Hotshots, and the
field house and gymnasium were hives of constant training.
Nevertheless the Carlisle varsity was perennially shorthanded.
It had to cull an 11 from just a couple of hundred fit male
students, most of whom had vastly less experience than their
collegiate counterparts. Harvard, Princeton or Yale could choose
from enrollments of 4,000 to 5,000 men. Mark Twain attended the
Yale-Princeton game in the fall of 1900 and observed, "The Yale
team could lick a Spanish Army."

To bolster Carlisle's roster, Pratt and Warner resorted to
recruiting. Then, as now, enrolling students purely to play
football was regarded as ethically questionable. It was also
rampant. According to Caspar Whitney, a journalist who helped
Camp choose the All-Americas, the Columbia team of 1899 was
"nothing short of an offense against college sport," with four
adult ringers, one of whom had played quarterback at Wesleyan
and even coached.

Pratt delicately queried the reservations, looking for
football candidates. "If you should by chance have a sturdy
young man anxious for an education who is especially swift of
foot or qualified for athletics," he said, "send him and help
Carlisle compete with the great universities on those lines."

Still, Warner was realistic: Carlisle was not like other
colleges or universities. It was an agricultural and industrial
training school with an academic curriculum that extended only
to the rough equivalent of 11th grade. As late as 1886 Pratt
reported that more than half of Carlisle's students had no
previous education when they arrived, and only six had finished
third grade. The average age at enrollment was 14, and some
students stayed as long as 12 years. Debates about the
"eligibility" of Indian players were therefore senseless.

As the Indians continued to make do with what they had,
physical toughness became their hallmark. "Gameness," Warner
said in 1902, "was a marked characteristic of every Carlisle
boy." A short but stout Alaskan named Nikifer Shouchuk fashioned
himself into a center and held his own against the best in the
country. During a game against Harvard, Crimson captain Carl
Marshall berated his own center. "A big fellow like you," he
said, "weighing twice as much as that little Indian, and letting
him carry you around on his back all afternoon!"

By 1902 Carlisle was more deceptive than ever. One piece of
razzle-dazzle installed by Warner was the double pass:
Quarterback Jimmie Johnson would toss the ball to a halfback
sweeping laterally -- who then tossed it back to him. Under the
quick-footed Johnson, a future All-America, the shifting
Carlisle lines looked like a deck of cards being shuffled.

One afternoon Warner introduced the Indians to a play he had
dreamed up when he coached at Cornell. It was called the
Hunchback, and it required a sewing machine. Warner had
Carlisle's tailor, Mose Blumenthal, sew elastic bands into the
waists of a few players' jerseys. Among those was the shirt of
Charles Dillon, a Sioux guard who could run 100 yards in 10
seconds. Warner instructed Dillon to wear the jersey untucked,
so the opposition would get used to seeing it that way.

The play was designed for a kickoff. As the ball descended
into the arms of Johnson, the other players would huddle around
him. Hidden from view, Johnson would slip the ball up the back
of Dillon's jersey and secure it with the waistband. The huddle
would then split apart, leaving the opposing team with no idea
where the ball had gone.

The play would punish any team that took Carlisle lightly.
One school had a particular tendency to do so: Harvard. Though
they'd never beaten the Crimson, the Indians had always given
them a game. Carlisle both admired and resented Harvard. The
Indians sarcastically mimicked the Harvard accent, but Harvard
was also their idea of collegiate perfection, and they labeled
any excellent performance, whether on the field or in the
classroom, as "Harvard style."

By the time the Indians checked into the Copley Square Hotel
in Cambridge on Oct. 30, 1902, they had a 5-1 record, but the
Crimson dwarfed them. Carlisle's heaviest player was the center,
Shouchuk, at 165 pounds, while two Harvard linemen weighed in at
215. But Johnson directed the Indians in lightning line charges,
and the Crimson defense ripped like paper. Carlisle constantly
shifted and realigned, tossing the ball back and forth. Johnson
would fake a run to the outside -- only to hand the ball to
Albert Exendine coming around from the end. After the Indians
moved all the way to the Harvard 18-yard line, Johnson kicked a
field goal, which in those days was worth five points. The score
was still 5-0 as the first half ended. Warner was emboldened. In
the locker room he called the play his team had been waiting for
all season. On the kickoff, he said, run the Hunchback.

Back on the field, Johnson and Dillon dropped back to the
five-yard line. Harvard's kicker sent the ball into the air.
Johnson gathered it in, and the Indians formed a wall in front
of him. Exendine pulled out the back of Dillon's jersey, and
Johnson slipped the ball beneath it and yelled, "Go!"

The Indians scattered, each player hugging his stomach as if
he held the ball. The Harvard players bore down on them and
began slamming Carlisle backs to the turf. Marshall was playing
safety, and as Dillon ran toward him, his arms swinging freely,
Marshall, thinking he was a blocker, stepped neatly out of the
way and let him go by. After 30 yards Dillon was alone. As the
Crimson scuttled around, wildly looking for the ball, the crowd
of 12,000 noticed the bulge in the back of Dillon's jersey and
began to shriek with laughter. Finally Marshall understood what
was happening. He wheeled and chased vainly after Dillon for the
last several yards.

Harvard coach John Cranston vehemently protested to the
referee, but Warner had taken the precaution of warning the
official that his team might attempt the play, and the ref had
watched carefully as it unfolded. He signaled a touchdown.

A celebration erupted on the Carlisle sideline. The Indians
had just outwitted and embarrassed the foremost university in
the country -- Carlisle style -- and taken an 11-0 lead. "I
don't think any one thing ever gave them greater joy," Warner
said later.

The Crimson was incensed, and the game from then on was a
mauling. Harvard's superior size and depth began to tell. The
Crimson flooded the field with fresh players who exhausted the
Indians' starters. Harvard bulled its way over the line for a
touchdown. To Warner it seemed that "every Indian was out on his
feet." Harvard scored again and held on for a 12-11 victory.
"For once, however, there was no mourning after a loss," Warner
remembered.

For the first time, the Indians were credited with
intelligence. The New York World ran a series of stories
explaining and diagramming the play. The paper's leading
sportswriter, Charles Chadwick, a former Yale football star who
had often written patronizingly of the Indians, now wrote, "The
poor Indian, so often sized up as deficient in headwork, has at
last earned the right to be considered as something more than a
tireless, clumsy piece of football mechanism. He is now to be
regarded as a person of craft. He has added his quota to the
history of strategic football."

When Jim Thorpe first set foot on the Carlisle campus, on
Feb. 6, 1904, he was a slight, narrow-shouldered boy of 16,
brooding, shy and guileless. His tribe, the Sauk and Fox, had
been expelled from Illinois to Wisconsin, then to Kansas and
finally to a 17-mile-wide rectangle of land cut by rivers in
what is now northern Oklahoma.

Jim and his twin brother, Charles, were born in May 1887. As
the boys grew up, the Sauk and Fox were in transition. Half the
tribe was still clad in blankets and lived in traditional bark
houses; the Thorpes, however, were a literate family and lived
in a timber house on the banks of the Canadian River, where they
worked a 160-acre parcel of land.

The boys' father, Hiram Thorpe, was a rowdy horse trader and
bootlegger. Their mother, Charlotte Vieux, a Kickapoo-Potowatomie
and a French Catholic, was as refined as one could be in Indian
Territory, educated by Jesuits and fluent in three languages.
Hiram was over 6 feet, weighed 225 pounds and was exceedingly
good-looking. He fathered at least 19 children by five women.
Charlotte bore him 11, only five of whom survived to adulthood.
She herself died before she was 40.

Hiram frequented Keokuk Falls, a stagecoach boomtown with a
red-light district famed for its seven "deadly saloons." The
stage driver liked to announce as he pulled in, "Stay for half
an hour and see a man killed." Hiram would get drunk and pass
out in the front yard of the justice of the peace. Or he would
ride home amusing himself by shooting out the lights of the
homesteads along the way.

The Thorpes' land was an abundant provider, studded with elm,
oak, cottonwood and pecan trees and lush with grasses to feed
the horses Hiram bred. The family planted corn, hay, squash,
beans, melons and cabbage and raised hogs, chickens and cattle.
By age five Jim could wield a shotgun with which he hunted deer,
turkey, rabbit, pheasant, quail and squirrel. He fished for
catfish and bass and collected blackberries from the thick
bushes.

Hiram beat his children liberally, but he also tied a rope to
a tree that hung over the riverbank so they could swing on it,
and he passed on his enjoyment of footracing and wrestling. He
taught his sons to handle horses and dogs. Jim would have been
happy to hunt and ride for the rest of his life, but his parents
insisted he go to school. In 1893, after their sixth birthday,
Jim and Charles were enrolled in the Quaker-run Indian Agency
boarding school. Jim hated being shut in and forced to follow a
rigid routine. He became a chronic runaway despite repeated
whippings from Hiram.

When the boys were 10, a typhoid epidemic hit the school.
Charlie was stricken and soon died. Jim would never recover from
losing his brother; it appeared to make him permanently
withdrawn. He refused to return to school. According to Jim's
daughter, Grace, "Hiram finally tired of beating him and asked
the Indian Agency to send him so far away he would not find his
way home again." He was packed off to Haskell, 300 miles away,
where he learned to march and to play football.

Jim ran away from Haskell, too. He hopped freight cars, hiked
and hitched rides on wagons for two weeks until he reached home.
This time Hiram whipped him so badly that he bolted to Texas,
where he found work breaking horses and mending fence lines on
cattle ranches. Jim was just 14, but he earned enough to buy his
own team of horses, which he drove back home in late 1902, only
to learn that his mother had died after childbirth. Hiram let
him stay at home for a while, but by December 1903 Hiram had
remarried and was again seeking a boarding school for his son.

When Jim arrived at Carlisle he stood just 5'5" and weighed
115 pounds. If he was tempted to run home again, his motivation
died just a few weeks after he arrived in Pennsylvania. On April
24, 1904, word reached him that his father had been killed by
blood poisoning, probably from snakebite, at age 52. The
orphaned boy settled into the regimen of Carlisle. He would
reside there for the better part of nine years.

In late December 1905 representatives of 28 major colleges
met and formed the National Intercollegiate Football Conference.
They charged a seven-member rules committee with developing a
safer, cleaner sport. Over heated objections from Camp they
instituted a half dozen rule changes. Mass-momentum plays were
forbidden. Teams now had to move 10 yards for a first down
instead of five, which took the emphasis off pure strength in
the center of the field. Most innovative of all, the forward
pass was legalized, though with an inhibitor: A team that threw
the ball and failed to complete the pass would be penalized 15
yards.

By the spring of '07 Jim Thorpe had grown almost five inches,
put on 40 pounds and worked his way onto the Carlisle scrub
team, the Hotshots. Warner turned his prodigy over to Exendine
for athletic tutoring, but the Indians end had nothing to teach
the young Oklahoman who moved like a breeze. "I held the college
records in the broad jump and the high jump, the shot put and
the hammer and several other track and field events, and I was
captain of the football team," Exendine would recall. "But it
took Jim just one day to break all my records. We went to a dual
meet together, and he won everything."

That August, Thorpe pleaded with Warner for a chance to try
out for the varsity. Warner was reluctant; Thorpe struck him as
still too "scrawny," and the coach didn't want his best track
prospect to get hurt. But the boy pestered him so tirelessly
that Warner relented. He tossed the ball at Thorpe and ordered
an open-field drill. About 30 or 40 players were scattered
around the field. Thorpe began to sprint, cutting and weaving
through them. He went through the entire varsity "like they were
old maids," Warner remembered. Some of them he outran; others he
faked out and left facedown in the turf. After he crossed the
goal line he skipped back to Warner, tossed him the ball and
said, "I gave them some good practice, right, Pop?"

Warner slapped the ball in Thorpe's middle and said, "Well,
let's see if you can do it again, kid." Thorpe cheerfully went
back on the field and ran through the entire defense a second
time. Once more he tossed the ball to Warner, who stood there
cussing both Thorpe and his defense. Years later Warner called
Thorpe's performance that day "an exhibition of athletic talent
that I had never before witnessed, nor was I ever to again see
anything similar."

In 1907 the Indians were the most dynamic college team as
they pioneered the elegant, high-speed invention called the
passing game. In popular histories the first use of the forward
pass on a major collegiate stage tends to be wrongly ascribed to
Notre Dame and the tandem of Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne, in
1913. In fact, Carlisle was the first team to throw the ball
deeply and regularly downfield, in 1907.

Although it's difficult to imagine, the spiral was not an
obvious concept then. Two men seem to have hit on it at about
the same time: Warner, who realized that throwing the ball
point-first would present less surface to the air and make a
pass travel farther, and coach Eddie Cochems at Saint Louis
University, who saw that holding the ball by the laces offered
the most secure grip.

The first downfield overhand spiral was completed on Sept. 5,
1906, when Saint Louis quarterback Bradbury Robinson threw to
teammate Jack Schneider in a little-noticed game against Carroll
College. A more notable pass was completed against Yale, by
Wesleyan on Oct. 3, but Carlisle may deserve partial credit for
that throw: Wesleyan's coach, Howard R. Reiter, claimed he
learned how to throw a spiral from a Carlisle Indian in 1903
when Reiter coached the semipro Philadelphia Football Athletics
and the Indian was on the team.

The Carlisle squad that gathered on the practice field in
September 1907 was the school's most talented ever, so rich in
ability that Warner considered it "about as perfect a football
machine as I ever sent on the field." The quarterback was Frank
Mount Pleasant, a 19-year-old Tuscarora-Iroquois chief's son
from just outside of Niagara Falls, N.Y. He wasn't the only
member of the team who could throw the ball. So could Pete
Hauser, a burly 21-year-old Cheyenne from Oklahoma, who lined up
at fullback.

To take advantage of the Indians' versatility Warner drew up
a new offense. Camp would dub it "the Carlisle formation," but
later it would be known as the single wing. It was predicated on
one small move: Warner shifted a halfback out wide, to outflank
the opposing tackle, forming something that looked like a wing.
It opened up a world of possibilities. The Indians could line up
as if to punt -- and then throw. No one would know whether they
were going to run, pass or kick. For added measure Warner taught
his quarterbacks to sprint out a few yards to their left or
their right, buying more time to throw. The rest of the players
flooded downfield and knocked down any opponent who might be
able to intercept or bat away the pass.

"How the Indians did take to it!" Warner remembered. "Light
on their feet as professional dancers, and every one amazingly
skillful with his hands, the redskins pirouetted in and out
until the receiver was well down the field, and then they shot
the ball like a bullet." Carlisle roared off to a 6-0 start. On
Oct. 26 they went to Philadelphia to face unbeaten Penn, ranked
fourth in the nation, before a crowd of 22,800. No team all
season had crossed the Quakers' goal line. But on just the
second play of the game Hauser whipped a 40-yard pass over the
middle that William Gardner caught on a dead run to set up a
touchdown.

There are a few signal moments in the evolution of football,
and this was one of them. Imagine the confusion of the
defenders. Suddenly the center snapped the ball three yards deep
to a man who was a powerful runner, a deadeye passer and a great
kicker. Hauser's pass to Gardner must have felt like an electric
charge. "It will be talked of often this year," the Philadelphia
North American said. "A lordly throw, a hurl that went
farther than many a kick." It was the sporting equivalent of the
Wright brothers' taking off at Kitty Hawk. From that moment on,
Carlisle threw all over the field.

"The forward pass was child's play," the
New York Herald
reported. The Indians "tried it on the first down, on the second
down, on the third down -- any down and in any emergency -- and
it was seldom that they did not make something with it."

Penn's All-America fullback, William (Big Bill) Hollenback,
said, "I'd see the ball sailing in my direction. And at the same
time came the thundering of what appeared to be a tribe of
Indians racing full tilt in my direction. When this gang hit
you, they just simply wiped you out."

There was one other significant event that day: Jim Thorpe's
debut. In the first half the Indians' veteran starter at
halfback, Albert Payne, wrenched his knee. Thorpe finally had
his chance, and he was so excited that the first time Carlisle
called his number he ran away from his blockers and was buried
under a pile of tacklers. On the next play he gained 45 yards.

The Indians outgained Penn 402 yards to 76. Carlisle's fakes
and feints so confused the Quakers that they "finally reached a
point where the players ran in circles emitting wild yawps,"
Warner remembered. Carlisle won 26-6.

Two weeks later the Indians were in Cambridge for the game
that was annually the emotional high point of their season:
Harvard. In 10 previous meetings Carlisle had never beaten the
Crimson. But this time the Indians were convinced they had the
superior team. The game wasn't seven minutes old when Mount
Pleasant struck Exendine with a 45-yard pass that the end
gathered in at Harvard's three to set up a Carlisle touchdown.
From then on the Crimson didn't know where to look. "Only when a
redskin shot out of the hopeless maze ... could it be told with
any degree of certainty just where the attack was directed," the
Boston Herald reported.

The Indians scored three more times that afternoon. Payne
started around end as if to run -- but pulled up short and
heaved a scoring pass all the way across the field. Then Hauser
caught a 31-yard pass from Mount Pleasant. Last but not
least, Mount Pleasant wove through the entire Harvard defense on
an 80-yard punt return.

The final score was 23-15. From Boston to New York City,
Carlisle's victory was front-page news. crimson hopelessly
baffled by brilliant tactics of redskins, one headline
announced. But the real story wasn't that a team of Indians had
beaten Harvard. It was that they were the masters of a new
sport. Carlisle football, mixing the run, pass and kick with
elements of surprise, was the game of the future.

By the fall of 1911 Thorpe was a superbly proportioned 180
pounds. He could run 100 yards in 10 seconds, throw a 16-pound
shot 48 feet and clear 6'1" in the high jump. In addition to his
brilliance in football, baseball and track, he led Carlisle in
basketball, lacrosse, hockey, handball and tennis.

But Thorpe was perplexing. His practice habits bespoke
laziness. Warner lost his patience but could not intimidate him.
Thorpe was mule-headed, proud and fearless. He believed he could
overcome anything, which made him careless about his ability.
"Nothing bothered Jim," Warner told sportswriter Grantland Rice.
"When he was 'right,' the sheer joy of playing carried him
through. When he wasn't, he showed it."

Interestingly, Thorpe agreed with Warner's estimation. "I
played with the heart of an amateur -- for the pure hell of it,"
he told Rice. For Thorpe, games were an escape; he was more
comfortable on the field than in society. He was fundamentally a
loner.

But beneath the seeming indifference something burned. He
enjoyed making opponents look silly. "He'd come straight up to a
man, then fake him one way ever so slightly, then go the other,"
Exendine said. "He'd hit him a kind of glancing blow which
knocked him more off balance than flat as a pancake." Sometimes
Thorpe would seek out a defender just for the sport of it. "When
he'd get loose and head for the goal," Exendine recalled, "he
took a devilish delight in upsetting the safety man. He'd run at
him instead of away from him. When he'd get a few yards in front
of him ... he'd begin to feint with his shoulders, eyes and
legs, until the anxious fellow was in a fearful state of
indecision. Then he'd charge right for the man, with his head
and shoulders down and his legs far out of reach. When they met,
Thorpe would ... deal him an awful blow with his hip. I've seen
him spin them almost completely around in the air."

The Indians went 11-1 in 1911, and when the season was over
Warner and Thorpe moved inside to the gymnasium, to train for
the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. They sailed for Sweden
with a U.S. team that included a West Point pentathlete named
George Patton. Contrary to stories told over the years, Thorpe
trained hard during the 10-day trip on the liner, pounding
around a cork track laid on the deck. He was in peak condition,
as his performances showed in Stockholm. He won four of the five
events in the pentathlon and pocketed his first gold medal in a
rout. Then he set a record in the decathlon, 8,412.96 points,
that would stand for 16 years.

The decathlon ended on the final day of the Games, and Thorpe
had his famous exchange with King Gustav of Sweden. The king
presented him with a gold medal, a wreath and a jeweled chalice
of gold and silver in the shape of a Viking ship, offered by the
Czar of Russia. As the two men shook hands, the Swedish monarch
said, "Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world."

"Thanks, King," Thorpe replied.

The theft of tribal lands was a standing source of jokes on
the Carlisle football team. After a bad call from a referee, the
Indians said, "What's the use of crying about a few inches when
the white man has taken the whole country?"

The 1912 Indians were a team of rampant high spirits. It
wasn't unheard of on the Carlisle campus to find the dairy cows
locked in the gym or a pig in a bag hung from the school
flagpole. The football players took pride in the fact that so
many disparate characters from so many tribes, regions and
circumstances could form such a brilliant whole. They were also
well aware that they were "making a record for their race," as
superintendent Pratt put it. In fact, they would literally set a
record: Carlisle became the highest-scoring team in the country.

Over the first four games of the season the Indians averaged
almost 50 points. Under quarterback Gus Welch their offense kept
opponents off balance and out of breath. Without huddling they
would run a series of plays as Welch reeled off audibles or used
hand gestures to make adjustments. Some of the gestures were
Indian signs.

The team was improved by the addition of two wildly talented
running backs who had recently been promoted from the Hotshots,
Pete Calac and future All-America Joe Guyon. The Indians
experienced just one hitch, in a game against Washington and
Jefferson, which they did not take seriously. Thorpe missed
three field goals, while Welch indulged in overly flamboyant
signals that annoyed Warner. As the coach stalked the sideline
in mounting frustration, the Indians fumbled around, and the
game ended in a scoreless tie.

Chastened, the Indians blew out Syracuse 33-0, Pitt 45-8 and
Georgetown 34-20. They became so cocksure that they taunted
Lehigh with their signal-calling in a 34-14 victory. A player in
the backfield would yell, "What about going around right end
this time?" Then they would race around right end. The Lehigh
victory gave the Indians a 10-0-1 record. But that's when the
joking stopped. The following week they were going to West Point
for the fight of their careers.

Army was in the midst of a four-year stretch during which it
went 28-5-1. Cadets tackle Alexander Weyand was a 200-pound
sophomore and a tireless one-man wrecking crew. In 1911 he sent
two Yale men to the sideline, one with a broken collarbone and
one with an injured knee. Leland Devore outweighed Weyand by 40
pounds. In the Cadets' backfield were four future World War II
generals: Eisenhower, Geoffrey Keyes, Leland Hobbs and Vernon
Prichard. Eisenhower had just average speed and weighed only 175
pounds, but, he said, "I so loved the fierce bodily contact of
football that I suppose my enthusiasm made up somewhat for my
lack of size."

The Army-Carlisle game had national implications for both
teams. The Cadets, who had the best defense in the nation, had
lost only once, to Yale 6-0. With a win over Carlisle they had a
chance to be No. 1 in the year-end rankings. While the Indians
had the best offense in the land, commentators suggested they
had run up their extravagant scores against weaker competition.
A defeat of gritty Army would end all argument and establish
them as front-runners for the title of best team in the country.

Then there was the longer view. For Welch, the game couldn't
help but recall "the real war out in the West." Thorpe,
especially, "was primed for that battle," Warner would say
later. "He and I had planned it ever since our trip to
Stockholm, and when the time came to deliver, Thorpe was there."

The Indians' opening play from scrimmage made football
history: Welch and the Carlisle offense lined up in the first
double wing formation, which Warner had designed and the players
had reserved expressly for Army. Both halfbacks shifted closer
to the line of scrimmage, just outside the defensive tackles.
The formation infinitely multiplied the Indians' options for
trick plays. Anything could happen: Welch, Thorpe and running
back Alex Arcasa might run, fake, reverse, pitch, block, catch
passes or throw them. "Football began to have the sweep of a
prairie fire," Warner observed.

The scheme played havoc with Army -- and electrified the
crowd. The Indians sheared off huge chunks of yardage. "The
shifting, puzzling, and dazzling attack of the Carlisle Indians
had the Cadets bordering on a panic," the New York Tribune
observed. "None of the Army men seemed to know just where the
ball was."

Army scored first, however, when Hobbs broke loose around
right end for a touchdown. But Prichard missed the extra point,
and the Indians countered immediately with a drive to take the
lead. The Cadets tried vainly to defend with a seven-man line,
as Eisenhower and his partner at linebacker, Charles Benedict,
double-teamed Thorpe. It didn't work. "Starting like a streak,
he shot through the line, scattering tacklers to all sides of
him," the Tribune reported.

On play after play, the Indians showed up Devore. Just after
the second-half kickoff, the Army captain lost his temper. As
Guyon lay on the field, Devore took a running start and stamped
on the Carlisle back. The crowd hissed, and Devore was thrown
out of the game. The Indians responded with a seven-play scoring
drive to take a 14-6 lead, and from then on they totally
outplayed the Cadets. Thorpe, in his greatest performance as a
college player, ripped off 20-yard gains as if they were
nothing. Once, when Eisenhower and Benedict seemed to have him
cornered, Thorpe stopped short. The two defenders crashed head
on, and Thorpe galloped past them. His runs set up three
touchdowns by Arcasa, whose scoring was merely the finishing
touch. Thorpe made one last spectacular play, a circus catch of
a 40-yard pass while surrounded by defenders. The final score
was 27-6.

The Indians, joyous, spent and bruised, boarded a train for
the trip home. As they seated themselves, a distinguished
looking gentleman with a silver mustache joined them. Walter
Camp introduced himself and congratulated the players on their
victory.

All the way to New York City the Indians and the arbiter of
the game quizzed each other and exchanged thoughts on strategy.
Camp said he greatly admired the team, but he didn't understand
its lightning style. "Your quarterback calls plays too fast," he
said. "He doesn't study the defense."

Thorpe replied that speed was the point. "Mister Camp," he
said, "how can he study the defense when there isn't any
defense?"

The next day The New YorkTimes called the Indians "one
of the most spectacular aggregations of football players,
especially in the backfield, ever assembled." They had played,
the paper concluded, "the most perfect brand of football ever
seen in America."

Every member of the Carlisle team considered it the most
satisfying game he had ever won. "The rattling of the bones,"
Welch called it.